Al Gore has an op-ed in the New York Times. Here are a few excerpts to give you the flavor of Al’s call for human redemption or else.

…unimaginable calamity…

…what is at stake is our ability to use the rule of law as an instrument of human redemption.

Churchillian rhetoric. Were it not for the complete and utter collapse of the certainty and precision of the climate science “consensus” at the IPCC, CRU, NASA, and MSM, a collapse which Al Gore, the world’s first carbon billionaire, conveniently ignores, one could almost be inspired.

In an article by Fareed Zakaria in the Washington Post, he states:

Sarah Palin has a suggestion for how Barack Obama can save his Presidency. “Say he decided to declare war on Iran,” she said on Fox News this month. “I think people would perhaps shift their thinking a little bit and decide, well, maybe he’s tougher than we think he is today.” Such talk is in the air again. Palin was picking up the idea from Daniel Pipes, a neoconservative Middle East expert who suggested a strike would reverse Obama’s political fortunes. (Actually, Palin attributed the idea to Patrick Buchanan, but she obviously entirely misread Buchanan’s column, which opposed Pipes’s suggestion. It’s getting tiresome to keep pointing out her serial gaffes, but Palin does appear to be running for President.)

Having actually read Pat Buchanan’s column, it is clear that he is against going to war with Iran, which Sarah Palin never denied. It is equally clear that he believes that it would indeed, as Sarah Palin averrs, raise Obama’s standing with the public. Here is a quote from Buchanan’s column:

And should war come, that would be the end of GOP dreams of adding three-dozen seats in the House and half a dozen in the Senate.

Harry Reid is surely aware a U.S. clash with Iran, with him at the President’s side, could assure his re-election. Last week, Reid whistled through the Senate, by voice vote, a bill to put us on that escalator.

Read the whole thing, as apparently Fareed Zakaria has not.

You may believe that Buchanan’s assertion about the prospective increase in Obama’s popularity, due to war with Iran, is dubious. You may agree with Buchanan that war with Iran is inadvisable. You may not like Sarah Palin. Regardless of all of that, it is clear that Governor Palin did not misunderstand or misrepresent Pat’s column, or confuse Buchanan with Daniel Pipes.

It is Fareed Zakaria that has committed a gaffe, not Sarah Palin.

We are besieged with domestic crises. The health care crisis, the deficit crisis, the Social Security and Medicare crises, last, but far from least, the unemployment crisis. If we keep going on as we are, the consequences will be dire.

We are told that these crises are insoluble, the U.S. has become ungovernable, Washington is broken. Actually though, it wouldn’t take all that much to fix them, and Washington is quite capable, theoretically, of doing so. Things just haven’t gotten bad enough yet.

Here are a few modest proposals. The first five of them are currently being proposed in the United States Congress by Wisconsin Republican Representative Paul Ryan.

1. Make Medicare and Social Security solvent by doing some means testing and gradually raising the age of eligibility for Social Security.

2. Give taxpayers the option of a simple 10% flat tax with no deductions.

3. Medical savings accounts, tort reform, allowing health insurance to be sold across state lines, and the same health insurance tax treatment for individuals as for employees.

4. Make U.S. corporations competitive with the rest of the world by bringing their taxes in line with other countries. Currently, the average combined federal and state corporate tax rate in the U.S. is 39.3 percent, second among OECD countries to Japan’s combined rate of 39.5 percent. Lowering the federal rate to 30.5 percent would only lower the U.S.’s ranking to fifth highest among industrialized countries.

5. Eliminate taxes on interest, capital gains, dividends, and death.

6. Eliminate unnecessary federal government departments and programs.
    a. Farm subsidies
    b. Department of Education
    c. National Endowment for the Arts
    d. support for NPR and public television
    e. etc., etc., etc. – this is a long list

7. Finally (and this is the real kicker) abolish public employee unions.

For the first time in American history, a majority of union members are government workers rather than private-sector employees. 7.2 percent of private-sector workers are union members. 37.4 percent of government workers are union members.

Union membership in the private sector has been declining for a long time, because it makes companies less competitive and workers don’t want unions anymore. The reforms that unions came into being to institute, have been instituted.

Private sector unions are adverserial. The union negotiates with management and they hammer out a deal. Public sector unions and management are collusive. The union facilitates the election of management. Management becomes an advocate for the union. This makes no sense whatsoever.

Public employee union benefits, pensions, and salaries are bankrupting government at the local, state, and federal levels, as is the extreme difficulty of firing or laying off government employees.

None of these proposals would be difficult to implement procedurally, and they just seem like common sense to me. All of the crises mentioned above, except, maybe, unemployment, would be solved. I believe that these measures would be such a relief to the real economy, the entrepreneurs and professionals and workers, that we would see a turn-around that would greatly lower the rate of unemployment as well, but that is speculation. Others may demur.

The difficulty is not procedural but political, except for eliminating public employee unions. That would take some doing. But none of these ideas are even being considered by the current Congress and President. That’s why there is a tea party movement.

These are the things that need to be done. Whether or not they will be done will be determined by the elections in November of 2010 and 2012. And by whether or not it has gotten bad enough yet.

I was the Technical Director of sfgate.com, the San Francisco Chronicle’s website, pretty much from its inception, from 1997 until 2003. I still have sfgate.com as my home page even though I moved from San Francisco to Tennessee over five years ago. I’m still interested in what’s going on in San Francisco and I check it out daily.

Reading articles and comments on SFgate I often see the argument that California only gets back 80 cents on the dollar from its contributions to the federal government, and that therefore it’s everybody else’s fault that the state is bankrupt. The implication being that the federal government, i.e., all of us non-Californians, owe the California government billions of dollars.

Well, yeah, there are a lot of rich people in California. If you want to live in the beautiful parts of California, you pretty much have to be rich. Because they are rich, they pay a lot of taxes. Rich people pay most of the taxes in the U.S. And they don’t get a lot of money back from the federal government. They’re not on welfare. They’re not in jail. They don’t need food stamps or medicaid. They’re rich.

When people talk about this unfair deal that California is getting from the rest of us, they imply that somehow the state government of California is sending all this money to Washington and only getting some of it back. But it is not the California state government that is sending money to D.C., it’s individual taxpayers in California.

Not only are they sending lots of money to Washington, they are also sending lots of money to Sacramento. California is one of the very highest tax states in the union, and these taxes mostly come from rich people, income taxes, property taxes, sales taxes, and various exorbitant fees.

So if anyone deserves a better shake from the federal government, it is not the state government of California, it is the individual tax payers of California, primarily the rich individual tax payers of California.

Once the bankrupt state of California succeeds in driving out enough businesses and prosperous people, they will then begin to receive more money from Washington than is sent, just like Mississippi and Louisiana. Then all will be well.

When the war in Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussein began, it was popular, and it had supporters on the left as well as the right. Many Democratic politicians voted for it, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, John Edwards, Joe Biden, Harry Reid, and Charles Schumer among them. Many liberal pundits also supported the war, when it was popular, like Peter Beinart at The New Republic, and Thomas Friedman at the New York Times.

When the war became unpopular, the Democrats were suddenly all against it, had always really been against it, had been duped, and the liberal pundits had a profound, wrenching, change of heart. While we (the U.S.A.) were still engaged, and young men and women were putting their lives on the line, Harry Reid declared that the war which he had initially supported was lost.

President George W. Bush went against popular opinion, and the advice of many of his own advisors, and the recommendations of the generals in the field, and sided instead with General Petreaus, and ordered the surge. Before the surge even began, Senator Barack Obama announced that it would fail.

The war had become very unpopular.

None of this behavior was unusual or unprecedented. Politicians and pundits routinely tack to the prevailing winds. It is part of their job description. The goal, after all, is maximizing votes and readership.

As customers are to businesses, so are voters and readers to politicians and pundits (and bloggers!). As CEOs owe fiduciary allegiance to their shareholders, so do politicans and pundits owe their benefactors and employers. David Brooks became roughly 20% less interesting when he took the job at the New York Times.

Obama was very popular, now not so much. Government takeover of the health care portion of the national economy (one sixth!) was never popular. Now it is even less popular. Government takeover of two of the three domestic automobile companies was never even slightly popular. Handicapping the economy in the name of global warming was never very popular. Now it has been laughed off the agenda entirely.

“Too big to fail” is not popular. Government control of the real estate financial market (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) is not popular. Giving tax breaks to union members is not popular. Giving special deals to individual states in order to buy votes for unpopular legislation is not popular. Dispensing long-sought Democratic pork in the name of “stimulus” is not popular.

The Democrats, in unprecedented control of the White House and both Houses of Congress, have attempted to impose as unpopular and ambitious a transmogrification of the American economy as has ever been seriously contemplated by those in positions of responsibility in the United States.

How about a little bit of imagination? How about a little bit of courage? How about nuclear power, a WPA/CCC jobs program, broadband for all citizens, maybe even tort reform and competition across state lines for health insurance providers? Or something, anything, that wasn’t just a corrupt payoff to special interests, or a cynical attempt to extend the power of those in power.

I was talking about some of this stuff with my son Jason a couple of days ago. He said, “We have a lot to do, and plenty of resources with which to do it, but things just haven’t gotten bad enough yet.” I think that is exactly right.

Creativity and self delusion. These are the unique marks of humanity, really just different names for the same thing. Human beings are the only animals capable of imagining things that do not exist. If being created in God’s image means anything, it means this. We are the imaginers.

Creativity is the process of not only imagining things, but actually bringing them into existence via effortful interaction with physical and “virtual” reality. As Steve Jobs is apocryphally reported to have said, “Real artists ship.”

For every million or more imagined things which do not exist, only one is ever “realized”. Only one seed falls on fertile ground.

Believing things that are not true, that’s what we are good at. We can’t help ourselves. Everybody on Earth, I would assert, believes, at the very least, 100 things that are not true, every single day.

Whether it be the multitudinous strange ahistorical “facts” of the world’s major religions and political parties, or the settled certainty/utter fraud of anthropogenic global warming, or the cost-bending virtues of ObamaCare, or the wonderfulness of the planet Pandora. Conjure it up, and somebody will believe it.

We humans are in the God-like Creation business. We are creatin’ fools. “I dream of things that never were, and ask why not,” said Robert Kennedy. So say we all, whether intentionally or not.

We dream. What we dream determines how our children will grow up, what our communities look like, what our own bodies look like, how we will make it, who we will be in the world. What the world will be.

This God-like power also makes us the gullible, brain-washable, easy mark of the animal kingdom. We will believe anything. If a belief in something rewards us in some way, we will do it, reality be damned. If it makes us feel superior or happy or relieved or powerful, we will believe it.

We dream of things that never were, and (if it feels good) ask why not?

This financial crisis has been a long time coming. It is a result of how our democratic (small d) politics works, on local, state, and national levels. Politicians on the left and, less so but still egregiously, on the right, have learned that the path to power is to make promises for which there is insufficient revenue, and then to deliver on them by borrowing money (the preferred method) or by raising taxes (on the “rich” and the sinful).

These grandiose promises are made in exchange for votes of course, but they are made primarily in exchange for campaign contributions, from large corporations, unions, and trial lawyers.

Individuals have also learned that only a fool lives within his means. Many people learned to live on home equity loans and credit cards, in expectations of inevitable increases in real estate values and general prosperity. Flipping condos was considered a great way to “earn a living”, as was day trading on the stock market.

Unfortunately, as Maggie Thatcher said, “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.” This wasn’t all about socialism. Much of it was just old-fashioned belief in getting something for nothing, a concept that informs but precedes socialism.

Judgment day has finally arrived. The U.S. government, California, New York, San Francisco, Detroit, cities and states across the country, and countries across the globe, have all, more or less simultaneously, run out of other people’s money.

Turns out there are no other people. It’s just us chickens. There’s the us that consumed, and still expect to consume, all these goods and services, like cars and boats and social security. And there’s the us that provided them, paid with IOUs. Ultimately it’s the same us, and we can’t pay ourselves. So, no more new stuff, no retirement, no health care, no consumers, no jobs. God bless the child that’s got his own. He better invest in gold and ammunition.

Stimulus, schtimulus, there is no quick fix. We all have to pay it all back. Except Goldman Sachs of course. In other words, we are all a lot poorer than we were pretending to be. Except Goldman Sachs of course.

There is a lot of whistling past the graveyard these days, desperate hopes that this is just another recession like previous recessions, and it will be over soon, and everything will be back to normal. That’s why the stock market is doing so well.

Not gonna happen. We’re not looking at a possible double dip. We are looking at a perma-dip. You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

This Abdulmutallab guy was on a terrorist watch list. I don’t care how much Janet Napolitano whines about there being 550,000 names on the list. So what? How many people are in the various databases that are accessed when you pay for your airline ticket with a credit card? What is the purpose of the watch list, if the people on the list are not actually, you know, watched?

Government spokespeople and media pundits can spin this any way they want, but normal people out here in the country are not as stupid as we may look to some. Most of us have our own businesses or are working for someone who does.

Most of us have to be competent at our job or at managing our business or we will lose our job or lose our business. If we did something as dumb as letting Abdulmutallab on an airplane bound for the United States, we would run a real risk of losing our job or our business.

Forget the fact that his own father reported him to the U.S. embassy. Forget that he paid $3,000 cash for his ticket, and had no luggage. Forget that he didn’t have a passport. Forget that the UK had already denied him entry. Forget all of that.

Apparently there is no connection between the terrorist watchlist database and the computers of airlines that fly into the United States. This late in the game? It is Inexcusable. Inexcusable! Forget that he was allowed on the plane. What was he doing with a valid multiple entry U.S. visa?

I’m not blaming Obama. These institutions, the CIA, the State Department, Homeland Security, have a life of their own. They don’t much care who is President. Their bureaucratic incompetence transcends politics.

Now, having already nationalized the domestic auto industry, and the financial industry, the President and the Congress wish to take control of the health care industry, and the energy industry.

I think it might be better if the President and the Congress just focused on national defense, and let us people out here take care of that other stuff.

It’s the end of a decade, the 2001 Space Odyssey decade. That’s how I see it anyway. I first saw 2001, on acid, at the downtown theatre, I forget the name, just off Market Street in San Francisco, behind the pool hall that was the model for the pool hall in The Hustler. The acid was unnecessary.

Stanley Kubrick was a great prophet of a major aspect of the mood of the coming decade, the relationship of man to machine, man to network, man to virtual reality, man (and woman) to the web. He anticipated the charisma of the digital, and the corresponding monotonal analog detached restraint of the human, in the way Doctor Heywood Floyd talks to his daughter on the tv phone, while in orbit, and the way she, as young as she is, knows to talk back. And in the impersonal way that the astronauts react to HAL and to the delayed video from Earth, from their parents.

But Kubrick, and Arthur C. Clarke, were wrong about all of the technical particulars. HAL didn’t really come true, nor did ventures to the outer planets, or even the moon, let alone a psychedelic alien accouchement of the singularity.

To celebrate the new decade, here is a selection of my favorite photographs from the past decade, except for the first four, which were taken in the previous decade.

I’m a computer programmer. I have been programming computers since 1966. My first programming job was at the Iowa State Highway Commission in Ames, Iowa. My first project was a computer model, similar in concept, if not complexity, to the computer climate modeling programs we have heard so much about. The purpose of my program was to predict when all of the roads and bridges in Iowa would need maintenance, and what kind of maintenance they would need. It was written in IBM 360 Basic Assembler Language on a million dollar IBM 360 computer that was less powerful than the Apple I.

The predictions were based on a set of data, and a set of algorithms. Data, such as when the road or bridge was built, what materials were used, how much traffic there is, etc. And algorithms that estimated, based on the data, when a particular road or bridge would begin to wear out and require refurbishment or replacement.

Of course the data, as is always the case, was incomplete and inaccurate to some unknown extent. And the algorithms were based on speculative engineering assumptions, and past experience, which was also incomplete and inaccurate. It wasn’t perfect. Computer models never are.

The current global financial crisis was brought about largely by computer models in which, obviously, too much faith was put. Unlike the executives at Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch, nobody thought my computer model was infallible. Still, it was better than nothing. It helped the Highway Commission prioritize road and bridge maintenance. It was a useful guide for where to look for possible problems.

That’s as far as you can go with computer models. That is all they are capable of. Comparing my Iowa road and bridge maintenance model to an attempt to model the climate of the Earth for hundreds of years into the future, is like comparing a virus to the human organism, in terms of complexity and unknowns.

Even those complicated financial models that got us into so much trouble are nothing compared to the complexity and chaos and infinite variables of the global climate. The completeness and accuracy of Iowa road and bridge data, and the engineering algorithms applied to them, are perfect relative to what we really know about the Earth’s climatological past, and the formulas of its future.

As soon as claims were made, based on climate computer models, that the “science” was settled, the debate was over, and the consensus was unanimous, it was abundantly clear to me that something was rotten in Denmark.

Computer models are not science. They are useful, but they are not proof of anything. They are not scientific evidence, especially in the case of a system so complex and unpredictable, so little understood, as global climate. Long before the revelatory CRU emails, it was obvious that there was another agenda here that had nothing to do with science.

The extent to which this criminal hoax has been perpetrated is nothing short of astounding. It reminds me of the Y2K hysteria. I had friends who were stockpiling food and other essentials in caves, preparing for the year 2000. I tried to tell them everything was going to be alright. There was no dissuading them. But this “climate change”, end of the world, cult has gone way beyond the Y2K delusion.

There is so much invested in it at this point, that it will probably take awhile to wind down. Declining temperatures for the past 11 years (not predicted by the models), and unprecedented blizzards in Copenhagen and Washington, D.C., are helpful, but not sufficient. It will probably take at least a couple more years of unusually cold winters before the con is blown.